Crisis of the House Divided: And Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debate, a rather dense mix of history and political theory with occasional recourse to things that Lincoln and Douglas actually said by Straussian political theorist Harry Jaffa who probably risked his Strauss card by quoting Lincoln and Douglas way more often than he cites Hegel. Not bad, but since he only mentions my hometown, host of one of the debates, only once, he can go screw himself and the dialectic he rode in on.
Anthony Trollope -- The Last Chronicle of Barset I read the first four books close together in time, went several years before reading The Small House at Allington, and now four years before starting The Last Chronicle. Fortunately, most characters and relationships are so memorable that it's not hard to fall comfortably back into Barsetshire after some time away.
It's a Gray Man novel. Easy to read, unrealistic yet grounded, and the main character has way more depth than someone who is essentially a coked up sociopathic version of Jason Bourne should have. It's going to take a while to catch all the way up on this series, but I'm now through 3 and currently there are 11 (releasing in 2022) so maybe sometime in 2023 I'll be waiting for a new book to arrive.
I don't have the faintest idea in the world why I thought reading a book about the history of Oklahoma City (a place in which I've never been and almost certainly never will) would be fun. And yet, here I am enjoying it. It doesn't hurt that Sam Anderson is marvelous prose writer.
It's actually in my stack of books to read (probably sometime next year) simply because so many people have raved about it.
Deep South: Four Seasons on the Back Roads an amazing and 480 page long book written as a response to, I theorize, a book by his rival and former friend, Nobel prize winner V. S Naipaul, who also wrote about the American South. Though here, Paul Theroux talks to poor people and actual black people and, as a result, IMO, kicks Sir Videa's Nobel Prize-Winning ass.
There wasn't direct election of senators, and Lincoln did the state equivalent of winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College. Wikipedia has the composition of the Illinois legislature then. It's good Lincoln lost, because he might never have been president if he had been elected senator in 1858.
Mentioned often in the Theroux book I just finished. Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, the 1943 autobiography of a journalist who was pretty significant in the first of the 20th century, who is noted for being an idiosyncratic and entertaining thinker, often cited as an influence on the likes of William F. Buckley... who could not have been thrilled with Albert Jay Nock's conclusion that corporations can be state-like bureaucracies and forces of evil, and on anarchists, who are likely not thrilled with his argument that all schools -- in addition to NOT being sponsored by the government, should be staffed exclusively by men.
Project Hail Mary was my first Andy Weir book. It was okay. The plot is propelling, but I feel like the dropping of math and science equations is more cover for a lack of depth in storytelling. All the times the character lists off some mathematical constant and says, "Well of course I knew that, I was a middle-school science teacher," was baffling. A big thanks for turning me on to Murderbot. Enjoyed the first two novellas.
Written by a guy I had never heard of. I honestly don't know how this ended up in my stack of things to read. With that said, he does a good job of presenting a view of humanity that somehow references everything from Daniel Kahneman and The Muppets to the book of Proverbs and Jesus' teachings. He's definitely in the conservative Christian realm, but not in the political power or send me money way that is so common today.
The Superfluous Anarchist: A Life of Albert Jay Nock a biography by the great biographer of slightly influential unorthodox thinkers, Michael Wreszin, who was very influential among his fellow biographers (I once met a woman who wrote the biographies of Rachel Carson and Beatrice Potter, and she considered all of his work to be must-read for the craft of life writing, which is interesting because his subjects are not figures known for thinking about the natural world (Oswald Garrison Villard (1965), Albert Jay Nock (1971), and Dwight Macdonald -- the latter (A Rebel in Defense of Tradition) of whom is the only subject who might be considered well known in certain literary and political circles). And this book yields no image except for something from Ebay, which won't link.
Short pieces at the beginning by the three surviving members, then the transcript o the 2 hours discussion that can still be found on YouTube. Dawkins is still the most abrasive, willfully ignorant, master of reductio ad absurdum to ever exist. Dennett is still the one I really need to read more of. Harris is still trying to have his religious/spiritual cake without allowing for the existence of any kind of god. Hitchens is sorely missed as he was the stalwart and the most likely to entertain a variety of thoughts purely to keep himself sharp.
Sitka by Louis L' Amour. About the transfer of Alaska from the Russians to the Americans. I'd like to visit Sitka someday.
I took a philosophy of Mind course in the early 80s, and one of the books we read was... I don't know if I would recommend it at this distance of almost 40 years, but it beat the hell out of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind. Of course, I dug this one a little more than Dennett's... ... though the philosophy majors of a more analytic bent hated it, because it didn't make arguments that could be pulled out and plugged into a syllogism. I have too many papers to grade, otherwise I would digress on the time I had a cup of coffee with Hitchens when he was guest lecturing at the University of Pittsburgh.
Five week summer session, which ends one week before fall semester starts, which is something I hope I remember if I'm ever asked to teach the second five week summer sessions again. Hitchens thought I was a grad student, which I was, though not at Pitt: he was wondering who had assigned the Thomas Love Peacock I was reading, though I had just got it at a nearby bookstore. We talked about gothic fiction, which we both found hilarious. He offered to buy me a cup of coffee and was unimpressed when I requested decaf. Feeling the implied burn, I had no choice but to accept when he offered to pour something from his flask into my cup. I don't know what it was (probably whiskey) but I'm sure the coffee was not decaf (in retrospect, expecting Christopher Hitchens to say "two brewed coffees, make one decaf" was a lot to ask), so I was wired and tipsy for a chunk of the afternoon.
Volume 7 of the TPB covers issues 31-35 of the comics. This covers (I believe) the last of the material that's in the show. The purple baby and the books written by dad are about to become much more interesting, but the love triangle really gets ramped up in these issues.
The Year of the Hunter, a memoir in the form of a diary by Nobel Prize winning poet and Lithuanian-born Polish speaking Cal Berkeley professor Czeslaw Milosz, whose prominence should really be such that I can find pictures of the book in places other than ebay. Interesting approach to a memoir though: writing a bit every day while thinking about the previous 7 decades of his life in literature and politics.
The writing is okay, and it's very obviously self-published, but this is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand the process of evaluating buying rental properties. I'll never go crazy like this guy did, but I'm shooting for having 4 properties in the next few years that are cash flow positive enough to pay my mortgage and then some.